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1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for managing processes. The invention more particularly relates to a system and method for customizing, adapting and creating business and technical processes for an enterprise.
2. Background Art
An enterprise is an organization of business activity groups that work together for the good of the entire enterprise. In general, the business activity groups are distinct from one another. For example, an enterprise may include an accounting department, a human resources department, a manufacturing organization and a distribution organization. Each of these business activity groups have their own functions and may utilize their own business processes, but they may utilize some of the same information.
Enterprise resource planning (xe2x80x9cERPxe2x80x9d) systems were introduced by ERP vendors to enable the enterprise to integrate the operations of the business activity groups, and to share information between its business activity groups, in order to make the enterprise more efficient. The ERP systems were quite complex and included application software for administering each of the business activity groups. Due to the complexity of the ERP systems, the application software for the various business activity groups was pre-programmed to inter-operate, and to share information, with the application software for the other business activity groups. By pre-programming the application software, the ERP vendor defined the business processes, e.g., a billing procedure, embodied in the application software, and consequently determined the business processes available to the business activity group.
In addition to defining the business processes embodied in the application software, the ERP systems also defined technical processes associated with the ERP system. The technical processes, such as the processes for seating up the ERP system hardware and for installing the application software onto the hardware, were pre-defined by the ERP vendor to ensure interoperability. Thus, the ERP vendor also determined the technical processes that were available to the business activity groups of the enterprise.
An enterprise that desired to implement an ERP system had few choices. The enterprise could purchase an ERP system that incorporated the same business and technical processes used by the enterprise, it could change its business and technical processes to match the business and technical processes embodied in the ERP system, or it could settle for a combination of both.
While the enterprise could select and implement an ERP system that matched the business and technical processes of the enterprise, or could modify its business and technical processes to match those of the ERP system, the ERP system was relatively inflexible once the implementation of the ERP system was completed. Any subsequent changes to the business and technical processes for any of the business activity groups required the re-programming of the pertinent application software by a programmer having expertise with the ERP system and its application software. Consequently, a significant amount of time and expense was required to incorporate the changes to the business and technical processes into the application software, resulting in lengthy downtimes and lost productivity.
Therefore, it would be highly desirable to have a new and improved system and method for managing processes including customizing, adapting and creating business and technical processes for an enterprise. Such a system should not require programming expertise, and should enable making changes to the processes in a relatively quick manner to substantially limit the loss of productivity due to downtime.
Therefore, the principal object of the present invention is to provide a new and improved system and method for managing the processes of an enterprise, wherein the processes can be customized and adapted, and new processes can be created, quickly and without the need for programming expertise.
Briefly, the above and further objects of the present invention are realized by providing a new and improved process management system that can customize, adapt and create business and technical processes according to a novel method of the present invention.
The process management system includes task information indicative of tasks that define process steps for a group of processes. The task information defines the steps as software events and as non-software events. The system further includes task relationship information indicative of a relationship between the tasks to define the processes, and application information defining the software events. A user interface displays the tasks and enables the selection of the tasks. The processes are completed by selecting the tasks associated with a particular process and executing the software events and the non-software events corresponding to the selected tasks.